When it comes to solving range anxiety, it’s not how fast you can charge, but how consistently you can charge fast
Consistency is perhaps the most unappreciated of attributes. Variety is, of course, the spice of life; while beauty is its own form of genius. And speed, well, it kills, doesn’t it? But reliability? Not a virtue that gets lauded nearly so passionately, “steady and solid” not exactly the stuff that sees its way into the script of a Jennifer Lopez rom-com with Matthew McConaughey (or that sees her stay married to Ben Affleck, for that matter).
On the other hand, as anyone who’s actually been married for 60 years can attest, consistency is the only thing that matters over the long haul. The same need for dependability applies equally well to anyone who has ever, for instance, bought a German luxury sedan out of warranty. Ditto if you’ve ever tried — probably to little avail — to nurse a Dodge Caravan transmission past 100,000 kilometres. And, while I do hate to kick a good car company when it’s down, is there anything more desperate than the poor Jaguar owner who really believes their XJ-S will only be in the shop for a few days this time?
If I am reading Euan McTurk — the consultant battery electrochemist who starred in our latest Driving into the Future panel — right, you can now add range anxiety and battery charging to the list of things for which consistency is the most enviable of virtues. To wit—
One of the myths surrounding electric vehicles is that big batteries are the Prozac that assuages all range anxiety. More kilowatt-hours means more driving, goes this most simple of battery calculus, and, if your fancy new plug-in can go 500 kilometres on a “tank,” well, then, problem solved, right? No more range anxiety!
Not quite.
As it turns out, if you’ve ever actually done much long-distance EV-ing, much more important than how far you can drive in one shot is how fast you can recharge and get back on the road. And that, says McTurk, is all about consistency.
You see, while automakers spend a lot of time boasting how much peak charging power their latest high-voltage batteries can handle, what they’re a little more shy — OK, a whole lot more shy — about telling you is that their batteries can’t actually handle those big numbers for very long.
Everything you need to know about EV charging
Even if I am over-simplifying what was happening, it doesn’t change the fact the Polestar prototype is the only electric vehicle I am aware of that can increase its charging speed all the way to 80% state of charge. And that it really did recharge 70% of its 77 kilowatt hours in less than 10 minutes, which, in Polestar’s words, is “is much closer to what you would experience when filling a car with fuel.”
In other words, the secret to eliminating range anxiety is not how fast you can charge, but how consistently you can charge fast.
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